Almost all computers in use today are connected to the Internet. With this connection, there has come a rapid rise of cyber threats, the infection of computers with viruses, computer worms, Trojans, spyware, adware and generally with any object that contains malicious code. These threats are referred to generally under the term of malware. The ever increasing complexities of these threats make the existing protection software and methods inadequate and ineffective, thus requiring a new paradigm, a new approach that are not available now, in order to identify the threats, to analyze attacks, to protect important hardware, software, and data against corruption and attacks, and to ultimately effectively defend against them without grinding computers and networks to a crawling speed or to a halt.
The typical protection available against cyber threats is protection software, such as is offered by MacAfee, Norton, Kaspersky and others. These programs compile “footprints” of known viruses and scan incoming files for such footprints. Any files containing similar suspicious footprints are detected, rejected, deleted, or isolated (quarantined).
In spite of this inspection of downloaded files, and in spite of periodic re-scans of all files on a computer for newly discovered virus and malware programs, infection of computers is common occurrence for everyone, and the infections and corruptions are increasingly severe. These protection software also run slowly and use up much computing resources on the hardware, often make computers running these protection software annoyingly slowly for other tasks. Cyber threats have evolved from simply annoying in the past to causing real damage and crippling computers and networks. Recent attacks have caused financial damage (by stealing financial information), have resulted in the stealing of commercially valuable and confidential information, have maliciously erased data (either globally—by wiping out and reformatting an entire disk storage device, or surgically, by removing targeted files selectively).
The rapidly increasing damages caused by such attacks have not gone un-noticed. Congress has passed the Cyber Security Act of 2012, elevating the awareness to the problem, yet offering no practical solution. The bottom line is that the current approach to cyber security is not working and inadequate. A new approach is urgently needed.
This invention offers such a new approach.